This is just a short post to tell you about my C++ sandbox. This is my area for trying out ideas (such as using mutable for caching) or testing C++ 11 features.

This is stored as a mercurial repository on bitbucket here. Please feel free to have a look or add to it if you have something you want to try out. I often use this to test answers to stackoverflow questions. A few of them have generated blog posts here as well.

The rest of this post is the current contents of the repository with a brief description of what I was trying to do with each file.

Arrays

In this file I was playing around with C style arrays, slightly old and a bit dated to be honest.

Comparisons

This may be a future post here. It defines a templatised base class for comparable class (using the curiously recurring template pattern . It means that if you inherit from this class and define one compare function, you get all 6 comparison operators.

ConstPointer

Testing out what you can do with const pointers. With a const Class* const you can only call const methods, with a Class* const you can call anything (this keeps the pointer const not what it points at) and with a Class* you can call anything.

Constness

Found an unusual bug and tested it here. If you have a reference (or a pointer) as a member of your class, in a const function you can call non-const functions on the member. This is because it doesn’t change the reference (or pointer) which the class keeps, what it does is change is the object it references.

CopyReference

Trying to copy a reference without using the copy constructor or assignment operator.

DivideByZero

I wondered what compiler errors/warnings you get from dividing by zero?
It turns out (in g++) that it will not give errors at all. It will warn you if you divide by a literal zero or a const zero, but not a variable with value zero.

But these will return a function pointer to operator(), they won’t call it.

Polygons

Archetypal polygon example for inheritance. A base polygon, a derived rectangle and triangle. Not great as you use a width and height for the polygon but not all polygons have it. Also I prepended all the classes with the letter C and allocated the instances as pointers to the base class.

SelfDeleting

Trying to make an executable to delete itself, unsurprisingly this doesn’t work.

SpareMemory

Something picked up from a dirty programming trick called the programming antihero (if you haven’t read that article I can’t recommend it enough!). In this there was a game programmer who reserved 2Mb of memory to lose later when memory was tight. I was testing to see how this worked by reserving some memory and checking memory usage. It is had to see the exact memory usage from this sort of thing due to differences in types of memory (i.e. private bytes/working set…) but it certainly took some memory.

StructClass

Testing out the differences between structs and classes in C++. I found that apart from private/public as default there is no difference! This includes if you declare class T in a template, you can still use a struct.

UserDefinedLiterals and UserDefinedLiteralsBinary

VariadicPointerOffset

Quite a complicated file. I was trying to use variadic templates to access private methods of a class. Hopefully not of any practical use (it breaks encapsulation and is extremely fragile) but an interesting idea to try,

Windows

get_env

Made to test getenv from cstdlib for getting environmental variables.

hashes

Using C preprocessor magic to join together variable names.

number_of_coins

Given an amount in cents (American currency as it was taken from an answer on stackoverflow) find the number of ways you can make it from quarters, dimes, nickles and pennies. This was taken from this answer.

stack_overflow_virtual

I didn’t think the reply to this question would compile so I tried it out. I realised you can override private virtual functions but not call them.